Senior Citizens are Special.

As a senior citizen myself, I have experienced  at first-hand, the intense feelings of loneliness and panic attacks when the world seems to be getting along very well without me.  It is a difficult transition to make, from  getting your due share of  attention, to increasingly being relegated to the margins. Not that I was ever suffering from "attention deficit disorder" but  everyone needs appreciation and understanding. And for the seniors, this is an increasingly scarce  commodity.
Retirement itself triggers feelings of isolation and being put on the shelf,so to speak. There is no shortage of  busybodies giving unsolicited advice about now having abundant time to relax. But that is the exact time when you need to get back into the mainstream of life, instead of being shunted aside like a loose-shunted locomotive in the railway yard.
Yet, is it not up to ourselves to  shrug off such negative thoughts and to chart out for ourselves a game plan to stay relevant, stay active and stay young? Surely, we should not be drowning in self-pity and negativism, but pulling ourselves up by our boot-straps-however increasingly difficult  a task it may be for us, with our expanding waist-lines and  decreasing flexibility?
This blog is for those of us senior citizens who refuse to be loose-shunted, who refuse to be strait-jacketed into confining categories like retirees, seniors or the old--but transit enthusiastically into a new life-affirming community that enjoys being a senior and  yes, old.

mpsingh. 
(Author retired from the central services).